Essays in Applied Microeconomics

Abstract

This thesis combines three essays in applied microeconomics. The first essay studies hospital responses to price changes and the introduction of DRG reimbursements; using a large administrative data set on all inpatient hospital admissions in Germany from 2005 to 2013, we find that hospitals respond stronger to financial incentives in areas of higher medical discretion. The second essay studies the effect of two UK compulsory schooling law changes; deriving an optimal pooled regression outcome and pooling data across 50 surveys, I show that the two reforms had no measurable impact on a large set of job market outcomes. The third essay studies the benefit of observing more customer data on optimizations of a large online retailer; predicting optimal product display ranks based on smaller data sets than the actually observed data, we estimate the effect of less data on click and order conversion rates.